In email discussions I have been stating all along that the decision of president Trump to place the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to head the Department of Transportation has to have involved a quid pro quo deal.
Trump is engineering (very unwisely) a massive public spending 1 trillion dollar ‘infrastructure’ boondoggle that the GOPe and Democrats are salivating over. A large majority of that funding will slide through the offices of the Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao, the wife of Sen.Mitch, who must have assured Trump he would suspend the filibuster in exchange for his wife’s appointment. Remmber, Mitch McConnell is a bona fide weasel, a key member of the GOPe that was against Trump from the very beginning.
SENATE REPUBLICANS NUKE THE SCOTUS FILIBUSTER
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is about to become a reality.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered on a key Trump campaign promise yesterday, brushing away an arcane procedural hurdle and in the process clearing the way for the swift Senate confirmation of originalist Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.
It is also the first in what promises to be a long series of crushing major defeats for Democrats in the current Congress who are desperate to placate their increasingly rabid far left-wing base.
The “nuking” of the filibuster rule yesterday bodes well for President Trump’s agenda. Trump is in a good position to remake the Supreme Court because so many of its members are elderly and are likely to vacate their seats over Trump’s four- or eight-year presidency. Three of the current eight justices are of retirement age. Left-wing Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are 84 and 78, respectively. Swing vote and occasional conservative Anthony Kennedy, who is 80, was appointed by President Reagan.
The senior Kentucky senator led the way as Senate Republicans invoked the so-called nuclear option yesterday, voting 52 to 48 along party lines to abolish the filibuster for nominations to the Supreme Court. Rule changes supposedly require a supermajority vote – 67 senators voting aye – in the Senate but four years ago under then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) the supermajority requirement was ignored and filibusters were disallowed for all judicial nominees below the Supreme Court. Lowering the 67-vote requirement to that of a simple majority is the so-called nuclear option, also known as the constitutional option.
